Wednesday,
November 14, 2001

No, I shake like that normally -- why?

Daily word count: 1,700

Word count for the month: 8,700

Holy crap -- I actually managed to make my quota for the day. Someone alert the media!

I think it helps that I did take the time to go over the first chapter and realized that, yeah, I have an entertaining story here. I also bounced a few ideas off the Man from McKinney via AIM, which dropkicked a very nice idea for my main character between my mental uprights (it's good to heterodyne).

And while I know that technically I'm not even supposed to be looking at any of this stuff yet, I'm going to be reading Chapter One at 'Dillocon this weekend, so I really would like to have it tight and ready to go. It doesn't have to be perfect, mind you -- just entertaining. And oddly enough, I've discovered that reading something out loud really points out trouble spots, info dumps or just plain boring bits.

Apart from that, though I'm trying not to fuss with the story too much, and just write it. Members of my writing group are already light-years ahead of me, and I'm starting to feel like Slackathor, I truly am. Admittedly, the last week hasn't been the most conducive for writing, but still -- the whole point of this marathon isn't to write well, but simply to write. I could be inventing words and slapping them down on the page and I'd still be achieving the main goal of NaNoWriMo.

So that's what I'm going to try and do from now on. Let's see if I can catch up in the second half, eh?

Oh, you're wondering about the title of today's offering. Basically, between trying to get a slew of bugs corrected in the help pages, adding the corrections to the user guides, turn the user guides into print-quality PDF files, adding links to said user guides to the help page templates, reloading the templates onto the help pages, and slapping everything into source control for deployment, I have been a busy little bunkie. Add the attempt to produce wordage on top of that, plus stress hangover, and I'm more than a bit shaky.

I just try to pretend I'm dancing. It's more fun that way.